Android Google Pay for business – the inside track

Consumer habits are changing, and the way your customers pay for things is changing too. Our smartphones are no longer devices to make calls on, WhatsApp friends or spend hours jumping from one social media app to the next. The technology we harness in the palm of our hand can now pay for groceries, your morning coffee or a meal out with friends.

There was a time where we couldn’t imagine people wanting to pay for stuff with their phone, ‘what about the security?’ ‘I don’t want the shop holding my information’ ‘what if they get into my phone?’ But there was also a time when people didn’t trust cars as a reliable and safe form of transport so they stuck to the horse and cart instead. Or people being scared to look at the television when it was first invented in case they were sucked in. So yes, it can be scary at first but this is where we’re heading, and your customers are already wanting the ease of paying with their phone, so let’s give them the option.

Are Google Pay and Android pay the same?

Google Pay replaced Android Pay and Google Wallet together into one app. Android Pay was Google’s competitor in the market to Apple Pay. This allowed users buy goods and services via their phones.

Similar to apple pay, android pay was a mobile payment method that lets Android users (mainly smartphone users) pay for their goods and services. Created by Google as a direct answer to apple pay and Venmo, it was first rolled out in the UK in 2016 but has recently undergone some changes with Google wanting to up the ante and rival Apple and Samsung pay. By incorporating both platforms into one app Google Pay, it intends to help users track purchases with ease and introduce peer to peer payments.

How does it work?

You’ve probably seen or experienced yourself a contactless payment with your bank card with a merchant machine, well this is essentially the same, except you swipe your phone over the card reader instead. All the customer needs to do is hold their device a few centimetres away from your card terminal and voila, the payment is made. The bit between the device is presented and the payment being completed involves using ‘Near Field’ communication technology (NFC) Your card terminal will then connect to your merchant account, all security checks are taken care of, and then the money is deposited. It’s the same process as your standard Chip and PIN payments, with everything going through your merchant account.

If you haven’t set up a merchant account, this is a good time to do so as you’ll need this to store payment funds (where they are checked and processed) before being released to your business bank account.

How do I know it’s safe?

With a new type of payment processing, there will always be some fear surrounding it, but android pay uses a security feature called tokenisation. This means both you and your customer are fully protected during the entire payment process. Before the customer even walks into your store, they will have already downloaded the android pay app and added their card details to their Android Pay Wallet. When doing this, their payment details are transformed into random letters and digits, which is called a token. Doing this means their card details will never be stored into the system or passed onto third parties.

When your customer makes a payment, the token is sent and is only readable by the payment processor. Even if anyone else got access to the token, they would have no way of reverting it to its original information.

What are the most used payment apps

Is Samsung Pay better than Google Pay?

Samsung Pay v. Google Pay. Both are very similar and share the same basic principles and functionality. The user simply swipes both at checkout to pay for goods and services. The apps themselves are very similar in user experience. Samsung Pay, however, is only available on Samsung Devices.

As a business your PDQ machine should cater for all mobile payment apps.

What is the payment limit?

With Android Pay, there is no limit to how much you can spend in one ‘swipe’, but most businesses put a cap on £30 to help stop large transactions being authorised without a PIN code.

So, the technology is ready, and your customers are waiting. Google pay could make the way you do business a whole lot easier.